Is there a special bad elf that creeps out in the pre-Christmas period to wreak havoc with would-be bestsellers? Novelist Helen Fielding and actor David Jason might be forgiven for thinking so, after 40 of pages of his memoir turned up in her novel.

Now it's Alex Ferguson's turn to face the wrath of fans, after his autobiography was found to contain 45 howling errors. The title of one of the season's competing memoirs says it all: John Bishop's How Did All This Happen?

In the case of the Bridget/Del Boy mash-up, a simple printer's error could be blamed. The Ferguson fiasco is less easily brushed away, given the publisher's insistence that the ghost-written book was read by a specialist football fact-checker as well as in-house staff. Perhaps it's down to the sheer volume of volumes that have been churned out with a view to that coveted top Christmas slot, or maybe it's to do with changing priorities in publishing as a whole.

But let's look on the bright side. Could these flawed books turn out to be investments for the future, as some other objects have become? A copy of the Beatles' single "Love Me Do", by that arty duo "Lennon-McArtney" sold for $19,000 last year – though its value was undoubtedly ratcheted up by fact that the spelling error identified it as part of a very limited batch of promotional discs. The same rarity value can hardly be ascribed to national treasure Sir Alex, the first edition of whose book sold 115,547 copies in its first week.

It's rare these days that whole editions are pulped due to unactionable errors (pace Jonathan Franzen) – and Ferguson's mistakes mainly involve benign, if embarrassing, slips of memory about places and faces.

When a copy came up for sale in 2010, the asking price was $89,500. On its first appearance, the errant publishers were fined £300 and had their printer's licence revoked. King Charles I was furious, and George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, thundered:

"I knew the tyme when great care was had about printing, the Bibles especially, good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the beste, but now the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned."